Ubuntu Now Supports The Allwinner D1 Powered Nezha RISC-V Board
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The Nezha single board computer is intended for AIoT development and features the Allwinner D1 SoC as their first RISC-V design making use of Alibaba's T-Head 64-bit core.
The Nezha features a single-core 1GHz RISC-V processor, 1GB or 2GB of DDR3 system memory, 256MB of spi-nand storage, Gigabit Ethernet, 2.4GHz WiFi and Bluetooth, and other basic functionality. Nezha's official Linux distribution of choice is "Tina Linux" with a Linxu 5.4 based kernel. But now more Linux distributions are beginning to support this low-cost board and Ubuntu 22.04 LTS is the newest option.
Of course, don't expect too much for performance with just a 1GHz RISC-V processor and up to 2GB of RAM. There is HDMI output on this development board but the performance will be very low and really just intended for IoT use-cases. Pricing starts out at around $112 USD for the Nezha board when ordering via AliExpress while the 2GB upgraded version is around $310 USD. The Nezha board doesn't appear to be currently available from any prominent western retailers. It's still a high price to pay for RISC-V especially with the $35 Raspberry Pi to deliver sharply better performance at this point. The Linux kernel has also had to add quirks/workarounds for dealing with the Allwinner D1 with some RISC-V extensions not being to spec.
In any event those wishing to learn more about the Allwinner D1 powered Nezha RISC-V board now with Ubuntu Linux support can learn more at Canonical.com. Those wanting to learn more about this RISC-V board itself can do so here.
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